eCommera raises $41M round for retail intelligence

ECommera, based in London and Redwood City, hopes to help its retail clients improve their customer service experience as it raises its Series C round of $41 million from Dawn Capital, West Coast Capital, Frog Capital, ePlanet Capital, WPP and Wti.

The 450-person company, that started in 2007, works with 70 retailers in 32 countries, including Neiman Marcus, Sur la Table, Brooks Brothers, Lifetime Brands, Bouclair, and Clarins.

Essentially, the cloud-based platform enables retailers, and mainly the person looking at the P&L, to analyze the data around the order and fulfillment to determine where a retailer can be more efficient.

"The big thing is a lot of retailers are looking to understand how they can meet the challenge of marketing, merchandising and operations," said John Squire, the North American President of eCommera and former Chief Strategy Officer of IBM Smarter Commerce, in an interview. The biggest expenditure for retailers is often in the merchandise, said Squire. To that end, retailers need to understand how to be more efficient with the ordering of that merchandize and fulfillment. For instance, for one retailer, eCommera was able to discover that a certain shirt size saw a greater number of returns. With the data, the retailer was able to realize the issue early, adjust the shirt size and site desscription, and as a result, see fewer returns.

Today, the discussion for retailers and the solutions they have is mainly around personalization, using Google or Facebook or retargeting to broaden out one's customer base, said Squire, who was formerly at IBM.

The problem is that retailers don't have a solution to help them focus on what happens when an order is taken and how that order gets managed to ensure the maximum amount of profit, he added.

For instance, some of the analytics that's generated include what's the most profitable set of products that can be shown that also correlates to what's in stock and a customers' preference. The bottom line is that the solution eCommera seems to be providing is: Optimizing the profit on the orders that are taken.

Since inception, eCommera, founded by Andrew McGregor (CEO) and Michael Ross (CTO), has seen about $4 billion of orders taken and analyzed over its platform in 2013. So how much profit has eCommera been able to squeeze out of those orders? Squire wouldn't say exactly, though he plans on getting back to me.